The snow came sideways off the plains and hit Ava Wright in the face like thrown sand.
She walked with her head down and her chin tucked into the collar of a coat two sizes too big, one hand holding the hood shut, the other gripping the strap of her backpack so the wind could not worry it off her shoulder. The frontage road ran parallel to Interstate 90 east of Billings, and there was nothing on it — no streetlights that worked, no houses, only fence posts marching into the white and the occasional blast of a passing truck that shook the air and buried her in road spray and fresh snow.
It was the kind of cold that made decisions for you. Eleven below, the radio at the truck stop had said, with a wind that took it somewhere past thirty. Ava had stayed at the truck stop as long as she could, nursing a cup of coffee she'd paid for with the last of the change she was willing to spend, turning the cup in her hands after it went cold, until the night manager — a new one, who didn't know her — told her the booths weren't a hotel.
She had not argued. Arguing got you remembered, and remembered got you banned, and the truck stop was one of only four warm places between the interstate and the river that would let a seventeen-year-old girl with no address sit down at all.
So she walked. There was an underpass two miles east where the wind couldn't quite reach, and a flat shelf of concrete up under the bridge where she'd slept before, cold but dry, and if she got there before her feet went from hurting to numb she would be fine. Hurting was information. Numb was the beginning of the part where people lost toes, and Ava counted her resources the way other people counted money, because resources were all she had: one backpack, one coat, one pair of boots with the left sole starting to talk, a plastic zip bag with two photographs and a torn bus ticket in it, and a body that had not yet failed her.
The bus ticket was the stupidest thing she owned and the thing she would have run back into a fire for. Greyhound, from the week after her mother died, when a caseworker with kind eyes and a clipboard had put Ava and Danny on a bus from Laurel with their things in garbage bags, because the trailer was being repossessed and there was a shelter in Billings with two beds. The driver had torn the stub off at the door. Ava had kept her half. It said BILLINGS in faded blue ink and nothing else that mattered, but it was proof, of a kind nobody could issue her anymore, that she and her brother had once been expected somewhere. That somebody had paid to move them toward a place, not away from one.
The photographs were behind it in the bag. Her mother, Ellen, in her nursing-home scrubs, laughing at something outside the frame, thirty-four years old forever. And Danny at six, both front teeth gone, holding a plastic dinosaur up to the camera like a trophy.
Danny was eight now. Danny was with the Pikes, in a house with a fence and a dog, because a year ago a judge had listened to a report about a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girl sleeping in a car with a seven-year-old, in winter, and had used the word unsafe in a tone that meant the conversation was already over. The judge was not wrong. That was the worst part, the part Ava carried around like a stone in her coat pocket. The judge was not wrong, and Ava had stood in that courtroom and agreed, out loud, because loving Danny meant saying the true thing even when the true thing took him away.
She visited when the Pikes allowed it. She owed nobody anything she had not written down: four dollars to Rosa at the truck stop for two bowls of soup, repaid a dollar at a time; a pair of gloves to the woman at the library who had "lost" them near Ava's chair; eleven dollars to the shelter intake man who had covered her laundry card and pretended it was a mistake in the machine. Debts were how she proved to herself that she was not what the street made of people. You could be homeless and still be a person who paid. The day you stopped counting was the day you started sinking, and Ava Wright did not sink. She had a brother. Sinking was not available to her.
The wind rose and the snow thickened until the fence posts vanished ten feet out. Ava stopped, once, and turned her back to it and breathed into her scarf until the air in the wool was warm, and that was when she heard it — not the crash itself, but the scream of stressed metal far to her left, a long tearing note like the world ripping along a seam, and then a sound she would hear again in dreams: a huge machine going over, grinding, sparking, sliding, down and down into the dark below the interstate, and silence folding over it all like the snow had never been interrupted.
Then a man began to scream.
Not words. Just screaming, high and ragged, from the ditch below the highway, on and on, the sound a person makes when their body has found a pain older than language.
Ava was already climbing the fence.